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Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: REDACTED on November 18, 2016, 02:09:22 AM

Title: Avast snapshots directory in EFI System Partition
Post by: REDACTED on November 18, 2016, 02:09:22 AM

Customer PC, Windows 10 with Avast IS 11.2, unable to install latest W10 anniversary update (1607)
- error "couldn't update system reserved partition"

Turns out his 100MB EFI System Partition (ESP) only had 13MB available, not enough for an update (15MB?). I looked inside the partition and found that there was a 35MB "snapshots" directory created in May 2016 - after some research it appears that this directory and files are created by Avast, as part of its sandbox virtualization feature. I could not find any reference about this in my searches here or in google, but I did the following and hope that it will prevent Avast from taking up any of the scarce space in the ESP again:

• in Avast Sandbox settings, changed Sandbox Storage setting from "same drive as modified file" to "C:\" - hoping it will henceforth only create snapshots on C:
• deleted existing snapshots directory from ESP

Curious if anyone else has come across this?

cheers,
pbig

Title: Re: Avast snapshots directory in EFI System Partition
Post by: Asyn on November 18, 2016, 05:25:53 AM

Update to the latest version (12.3.2280): https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=189836.0

Title: Re: Avast snapshots directory in EFI System Partition
Post by: Eddy on November 18, 2016, 10:20:52 AM

Also teach the customer to keep things (especially security related) up-to-date.

Title: Re: Avast snapshots directory in EFI System Partition
Post by: REDACTED on November 20, 2016, 11:49:01 PM

Thanks for the replies guys, I do understand about keeping software up to date.

Are you saying that the observed behaviour does not occur in the latest version?

Title: Re: Avast snapshots directory in EFI System Partition
Post by: Asyn on November 21, 2016, 05:22:18 AM

Quote from: pbig on November 20, 2016, 11:49:01 PM

Are you saying that the observed behaviour does not occur in the latest version?

Yes, NG has been replaced by CyberCapture.

Title: Re: Avast snapshots directory in EFI System Partition
Post by: REDACTED on November 21, 2016, 07:00:43 AM

Excellent, thanks!

Title: Re: Avast snapshots directory in EFI System Partition
Post by: Asyn on November 21, 2016, 07:17:15 AM

You're welcome.

Title: Re: Avast snapshots directory in EFI System Partition
Post by: Eddy on November 21, 2016, 11:05:39 AM

And on a note, 100Mb is not really enough for Windows 10 if also applications are installed on that drive/partition.